The Fragmented Paradigm

Mafia II Review (Xbox 360/PS3)

I could never really get into Grand Theft Auto. I know it’s supposed to be the quintessential king of open-world games, but it just never grabbed me. Open-world titles offer what amounts to freestyle gaming: go where you want, do what you want and complete the story whenever you get around to it. But the trade-off is that you are essentially playing a game with only one level; and so it is crucial – absolutely vital – that that one level is interesting. But Grand Theft Auto’s continual fixation on modern day gangland – even as cartoonishly as it is represented – holds no appeal for me. Gangsters rarely make for interesting characters, obsessed as they are with the crudities of life. And relegating the player to a world that goes out of its way to celebrate their unique brand of violent hedonism just makes the whole thing come off as crass.

The modern day setting doesn’t help either. I don’t see the appeal of driving around an exaggerated version of modern Americana. I live in California, I can do that anytime.

But now we go back to a simpler time: back before Global Warming...

Mobster culture, though, is a bit more layered. Mobsters didn’t have turf, they had business interests; they didn’t wear gang colors, they wore suits. They held summits, organized their infrastructure. They had families, ethical codes, traditions and decorum. But of course that was all veneer and underneath it was a bunch of guys shooting each other, torturing each other and betraying each other. They obtained their funds in more intricate ways than street gangs, but still frittered them on the same baser pleasures. The cold hard reality is that a mobster is just a gangster with delusions of civility.

But that delusion is reflective of the times in which the Mob held the most sway. Postwar America was a very pretty era; in fact it became the aesthetic of classic Americana. It saw the beginnings of America’s prominence on the world stage, suburban sprawl, car culture, teen culture and rock-n-roll; it was in many ways the foundation of modern America. But it was also a social hellscape for anyone who wasn’t white, male or rich. It was – like the Mob itself – a twisted nest of veneers, pretenses and hypocrisies; and it is that complexity – which Mafia II recreates so masterfully – that makes its Empire Bay more interesting than Liberty City and its ilk could ever hope to be.

You get your first good view of Empire Bay in the 1940s. Covered in snow, the old Fords filling the streets, “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” playing in the background – the whole thing looks like a Norman Rockwell painting come to life. Eventually, you’ll make it into the fifties – with its sleeker cars and pretty suburban neighborhoods – and it is immediately obvious why even today we still return to the aesthetic of this decade. Driving through the city in either time is like taking a tour through the art of postwar America. It’s all imagery and color, the superficial memory of the era on display. This establishes the world for you, immerses you in that fabled time of a simpler America. But once you take a moment to really examine it, you’ll see that this era was anything but simple and nowhere near as pretty as it first appears.

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Missions are one good way of doing that. One of the first jobs you get is to rough up some dockworkers who don’t want to pay into an extortion racket and it highlights the oppressed state of the working class at the time. But even just getting out of your car and walking around gives you some insight. You can overhear conversations from the people on the streets about that awful rock music all the kids listen to or the way young girls are behaving or perceived offenses by those dirty rotten [insert racial slur here]. Your car’s radio also reveals the unfortunate social undercurrents of the time, with songs citing Eve’s corruption or Delilah’s betrayal as being “just like a woman” or the DJ’s dreading the advent of the carphone and advising the ladies not to “dial and drive.” Empire Bay is an excellent and endlessly captivating representation of its time period. It faithfully recreates the imagery of the era, but also the burbling social tensions that would ultimately result in the Civil Rights movements of the sixties.

And the mafia is similarly represented. They dress nice, they hold their meetings over a good meal and they actually denounce street gangs as animals who do nothing but steal things, shoot things and sell dope. Well, of course, that’s basically all you do too. Much like the city itself, once you probe beneath the mafia’s genteel exterior, you find a bunch of guys who spout more profanities per sentence than a sailor with a stubbed toe, who celebrate every victory at the local cathouse and who drive around for weeks at a time with some guy’s rotting corpse in their trunk. They act like the civilized alternative to random crime, but really they’re just brutes in suits.

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But for a young Italian immigrant just back from a forced participation in World War II, they’re the last best hope to make something of himself. I’ve heard it said that Vito isn’t a sympathetic protagonist, that he seems to have no agency or reaction or moral objection to anything that happens. And it’s true Vito doesn’t make grand speeches about his decisions, doesn’t force-feed any points or life lessons, but I fail to see why that’s a negative. His actions do have clear motivations, he just doesn’t beat us over the head with them; and I especially like how the gameplay subtly aligns those motivations with our own.

For example, it has also been said that Empire Bay is a boring open world because it has no side quests or optional missions to complete. But that’s exactly the point. This is a world without opportunity, without legitimate means of advancement, where Vito’s only option to achieve the American Dream that was becoming so popular at this time was to follow the mafia path, no matter how unseemly or dangerous it became. He actually does try to get an honest job at the docks early in the story and he is assigned the task of hauling dozens of heavy crates onto a truck for ten dollars. The game does a good job of making us share his frustration and his eagerness to seek the criminal life by having us participate in his task. It evens tells us that we can keep hauling crates or just leave the job incomplete once we’ve had enough. And much like Vito, we have no desire to squander our time on so tedious a task for so meager a reward. Vito joins the Mob for the same reason we join the Mob: there isn’t anything else worth doing.

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Tags: "Good" Ranking, History, Playstation 3, Videogame Reviews, Xbox 360